after searching for hours and hours I finally found a site which gave me the info I needed. The key roadblock for me was that I kept putting in 'passphrases' when I needed to leave them blank (or maybe it was the fact that my SSH daemon wasn't running--quickly remedied by turning on 'remote login' in the pref pane) so it would always ask for the passphrase.

Now I tar my files and SCP them to the needed server and automatically back up my files overnight via the crontab thingy. Wonderful.